Cameron - no pacts and in it for the long term


On Slugger, Turgon has picked up on David Cameron's determination that the Conservatives and Unionists will not stand aside in certain constituencies, in favour of the DUP. In an interview with the News Letter the leader of the opposition stated,

"We're a United Kingdom party. I don't stand aside in Glasgow because it might help the Liberals. I don't stand aside in East London because it might help the Greens.

"This is a UK party and I want everyone in Northern Ireland to have the chance to vote for what I hope will be the next Government of our country."


This position is entirely consistent and entirely necessary. Depriving voters of the ability to vote for pan-UK unionism is no basis on which to contest elections. There are profound differences between the Conservatives and Unionists and their supposed unionist rivals, which must be played out at the ballot box.

Those who have entered into the UCUNF arrangement in the belief that it can be easily severed are not on the same page as the force's leader.

"I'm a very strong believer in the United Kingdom, that it's a family, and that families need things that bring them together and just as I believe the Conservatives can recover in Scotland, so I believe that in Northern Ireland there should be a Conservative United Kingdom alternative.

"I've believed this for many years, many years and yes, I will stick around for the very, very long haul.


Surely an example of the type of positive, unequivocal message which should be put across during an election campaign.

Incidentally, I believe that another erroneous story is likely to be carried in the Sunday World tomorrow, along similar lines to the claims which the paper made last week.

Comments

Timothy Belmont said…
I like the overtures I'm hearing from David Cameron a lot. Now there's a genuine feeling that we, in NI, are being offered a true and genuine alternative to the traditional NI parties.

Tim
23 May 2009 at 13:59
eXposer said…
I welcome the fact that he actually supports the United Kingdom; whether a Tory or not, I don't see how unionists could disagree with Camerons views.
23 May 2009 at 16:01
Seymour Major said…
I'm glad Cameron said that.

I just hope this is sufficient to put paid to all this speculative nonsense about Sylvia Hermon being allowed to stand as a UUP candidate.
23 May 2009 at 22:24
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more